The Jim Thompson House, Bangkok
Six traditional teak houses reassembled beside a canal, and the art collection of the American who revived Thai silk.
The Jim Thompson House, Bangkok
The Jim Thompson House is a compound of six traditional teak buildings on a khlong in central Bangkok, brought in from Ayutthaya and elsewhere in the 1950s and reassembled here by the American businessman who rebuilt the Thai silk industry after the war.
The houses are raised on posts in the traditional way, with steep tiled roofs and walls that lean slightly inward, and Thompson kept them as living rooms rather than exhibits. They hold the Southeast Asian art he collected - Buddhist sculpture, Chinese porcelain, Burmese carving - arranged the way he used it rather than as a catalogue. The garden is dense and shaded, and the canal is still in use.
Thompson vanished while walking in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia in 1967 and was never found, which has kept the house in the public imagination ever since. It is in Pathum Wan, a few minutes on foot from the National Stadium end of the Skytrain.
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